{"id":880,"date":"2017-07-24T00:45:02","date_gmt":"2017-07-24T05:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pegasus-gulf.com\/?p=880"},"modified":"2017-07-24T22:33:30","modified_gmt":"2017-07-25T03:33:30","slug":"warhammer-40000-a-review-of-8th-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pegasus-gulf.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/warhammer-40000-a-review-of-8th-edition","title":{"rendered":"Warhammer 40,000 – A Review of 8th Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down and chat in depth about the 8th edition\u00a0of Warhammer 40,000\u00a0with Gorlock the Putreficent<\/a>, an\u00a0upstanding member of our gaming community.<\/p>\n

Gorlock has been a driving force in writing the fluff for the Pegasus Gulf, and has been with us since inception. He has designed numerous game\u00a0systems in his free time, usually to the great benefit his regular gaming circle. Notably, he has been a lead designer on the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Roll Playing Game<\/a> system, which has grown a considerable online following.<\/p>\n

Gorlock has graciously agreed to provide us his thoughts on 8th edition, giving us a detailed explanation of his likes and dislikes of the new system. While not as enthusiastic of an adopter of 8th edition as the rest of us, his comments reveal some of the drawbacks of the new system, and some musings on how the system could improve with time.<\/p>\n

So without further ado. . \u00a0.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

+++++<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I like to think I know what I’m talking about when it comes to ye olde game design, its my one niche of expertise I think (appeal to authority intensifies).<\/p>\n

I mean its better than 7th but that is a low<\/strong>\u00a0bar,\u00a0and even that is contestable, because its sort of a baby-out-with-the-bathwater deal. Basically, my beef is that\u00a0the problems with 7th edition did not come from the core rules; the problems with 7th edition came from the army rules. In my opinion, 8th edition just wiped out\u00a0everything<\/strong>\u00a0and went too far.<\/p>\n

For me it’s a shame, because the lore is good and the 7th edition\u00a0core rules were good for the most part. I feel as though they\u00a0pulled an Age of Sigmar (“AoS”) and hoped no one would notice.\u00a0AoS suffers from repetitive games, which can become\u00a0dreadfully boring\u00a0as\u00a0the matchups are predictable and the tactics always the same. It mostly\u00a0suffers from overly simplistic mechanics, some of which were ported into 8th edition, such as battleshock.<\/p>\n

I personally think the battleshock is a lazy mechanic, and I was praying<\/strong>\u00a0that they weren’t\u00a0going to port it over from AoS. But\u00a0they did.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem with battleshock, and perhaps the\u00a0biggest thing I’ve noticed overall, is there are zero ways to exert the same level\u00a0of map control, suppression, or anything like that. The game can quickly\u00a0just turn into “roll to kill thing”, which is a bland approach to game design.<\/p>\n

Now that being said, I do<\/strong> have good<\/strong> things to say about the new edition, and even some of the features ported over from AoS.<\/p>\n

For example, porting in the monster wound profile scaling, so a monster at 1 HP is different from the same monster at 10 HP is really cool and I’m a big fan. I\u00a0think it adds a layer of dynamism to the game that lets you get a lot of gameplay value from “big guys” – both from tactical depth and from the sheer diversity of gameplay received from a single\u00a0model. It would be particularly cool if there were a number of monsters that actually got better at some things as they get lower, just to sort of swing the gameplay the monster \/ vehicle chooses to engage in.<\/p>\n

Conversely, I wish the same type of complexity could have been brought to core units.\u00a0While you can “disable” large monsters and vehicles, you cannot “disable” infantry,\u00a0even temporarily.<\/p>\n

Overall, the game in general feels too all-or-nothing for my personal tastes.\u00a0In my mind, the\u00a0ideal game has less units on the board, but those units are more in depth and have staying power so it becomes more about control and long term planning rather than short term front-loaded “he who takes first turn wins” mentality of alpha strike gameplay. This kind of gameplay has\u00a0been a problem for\u00a0Warhammer 40,000\u00a0since 6th ed, at least. A case in point was the Imperial Guard leaf blower list, and the 7th edition transition when the fast and powerful Eldar\u00a0and Tau codexes dropped into the meta alongside slower-paced books such as Space Wolves and Orks.<\/p>\n

To\u00a0that end,\u00a0I think a game that relies on hordes of\u00a0cheap throwaway units that die in droves are the realm of computer games, and a game that relies on hand painted models should throw a bit more weight behind\u00a0each unit.<\/p>\n

This game design view taints my perspective,\u00a0and not everyone will agree with me on that point. To summarize my previous points, and to raise a few more, I guess I could say I’m\u00a0most disappointed in three things:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1 – Battleshock<\/strong><\/p>\n

Battleshock tests are a cheap workaround that let the game designers\u00a0circumvent morale mechanics. I have always felt\u00a0that\u00a0the fear mechanics used by\u00a0Games Workshop, and Warhammer 40,000 especially,\u00a0had a lot\u00a0of potential that was entirely squandered. In 7th edition,\u00a080% of armies ignored fear,\u00a0so it was really just punishment for the 20% that didn’t, and those armies\u00a0were often armies that were already hurting\u00a0enough that didnt even need to be punished by it (COUGH ORKS COUGH). But instead of modifying this system a little, or better yet, re-evaluating who should be fearless, they just killed the entire system for a tepid\u00a0“save or die” system.<\/p>\n

I think fear systems can be very\u00a0workable if you don’t choose to make them complicated, which Games Workshop\u00a0often did. In 7th edition, morale checks weren’t even complicated, its just that no armies barring Orks, Imperial\u00a0Guard, and maybe Necrons had reason to fear them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2 – Cover<\/strong><\/p>\n

The redesigned of the cover system continues to play into the simplification of the game. While I like that moving through cover was\u00a0pruned (it always felt tedious), cover\u00a0fundamentally fulfilled a role in old warhammer which was protecting you from low AP weapons. Now that its just a +1 save, and low AP has been replaced with save mod, it is often useless, and only serves to buff armies such as Space Marines that didn’t\u00a0need to rely on cover in the first place.<\/p>\n

However, the bonus to Space Marines still\u00a0doesn’t help. Because of the continued pervasiveness of high save modifier weapons, we are quickly seeing the return of the low-ap\u00a0spam seen in\u00a07th edition. Like the changes to morale, this feels like\u00a0a lazy bandage on a particularly injurious\u00a0problem. Perhaps another route could have been attaching a\u00a0“cover save mod” onto weapons, so some weapons could be good against\u00a0armour, some good against\u00a0cover, and some good against\u00a0neither or both. In the new\u00a0system, if a weapon is good vs armour, its good vs cover too, which means\u00a0weapons with a high save modifier are always better than their comparable peers. It is a system that encourages spam.<\/p>\n

Though this isn’t my ideal, an alternative might be\u00a0a penalty to hit. It would fit better with their streamlining of the game, and would make cover more meaningful than\u00a0a\u00a0save bonus,\u00a0since the bonus can be easily\u00a0negated\u00a0by the singular method of weapon spam.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3 – Save Modifiers<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think I covered it well enough already, but perhaps this deserves to\u00a0be its own issue.<\/p>\n

I think saves are a very elegant way of handling it in a non-small skirmish game,\u00a0both\u00a0because of the simplicity but also the engagement and viscerality of rolling dice. It gives an illusion of control to the player being attacked, and actual\u00a0control if they have shenanigans they can pull with save dice.<\/p>\n

I’d like to see a system with 3 separate types of “Baseline Saves” and then Invulns. The three baseline being “Armour” “Cover” and another save, perhaps “Tank”\u00a0(for vehicles, monstrous creatures, etc).\u00a0Each save would have separate modifiers.<\/p>\n

So something that might be -2 against a\u00a0guardsman in cover isn’t -2 against\u00a0a Space Marine, and vice versa, because fundamentally they are differently armoured and I think that would be a cool way to differentiate them both on the table and connect it to lore.<\/p>\n

In my opinion,\u00a0there would be a lot of benefit to implementing a\u00a07th edition\u00a0AP system, but with the three listed types of armour. It would add a certain level of tactical depth that has\u00a0been greatly\u00a0diminished by rolling cover into armour.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n

In conclusion, while some improvements were made to the system, I think that Games Workshop missed an opportunity to explore interesting new game design concepts, and took a simpler route. The result is a game that while not quite so tactically bland as Age of Sigmar, lacks the depth and lore connections of its previous incarnations. Time will tell how codexes and other supplements change the meta, and whether the quality of the game will increase with the introduction of its new mechanics, or decline with the loss of its old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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